The New M4 Instance Type (Bonus: Price Reduction on M3 & C4)

We launched Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) with a single instance type (m1.small) way back in 2006! Since then, we have added many new types in response to customer demand, enabled by improvements in memory and processor technology (see my recent post, EC2 Instance History, for a look back in time).

Today we are adding new M4 instances in five sizes. These are General Purpose instances, with a balance of compute, memory, and network resources.

Let’s take a closer look!

New M4 Instances The new M4 instances feature a custom Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processor optimized specifically for EC2. They run at a base clock rate of 2.4 GHz and can go as high as 3.0 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost. Here are the specs:

Instance Name

vCPU Count

RAM

Instance Storage

Network Performance

EBS-Optimized

m4.large

2

8 GiB

EBS Only

Moderate

450 Mbps

m4.xlarge

4

16 GiB

EBS Only

High

750 Mbps

m4.2xlarge

8

32 GiB

EBS Only

High

1,000 Mbps

m4.4xlarge

16

64 GiB

EBS Only

High

2,000 Mbps

m4.10xlarge

40

160 GiB

EBS Only

10 Gbps

4,000 Mbps

If you are running Linux on an m4.10xlarge instance, you can also control the C states and the P states (see my post on the New C4 Instances to learn more about this). The supersized core count on this instance will be great for applications that use multiple processes to achieve a high degree of concurrency.

These instances also offer Enhanced Networking which delivers up to 4 times the packet rate of instances without Enhanced Networking, while ensuring consistent latency, even when under high network I/O. Within placement groups, Enhanced Networking also reduces average latencies between instances by 50% or more. The M4 instances are EBS-Optimized by default, with additional, dedicated network capacity for I/O operations. The instances support 64-bit HVM AMIs launched within a VPC.

The M4 instances are available today in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) regions. You can launch them in On-Demand or Spot form, and you can also purchase Reserved Instances.

Price Reductions on M3 and C4 Instances As part of today’s launch we are lowering the On-Demand and One Year Reserved Instances prices for the M3 and C4 instances by 5% in the US East (Northern Virginia), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (Frankfurt), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), and Asia Pacific (Sydney) regions.

On-Demand Instance price reductions are effective June 1, 2015. Reserved Instance price reductions will apply to purchases after June 11, 2015. For more information, see the EC2 Pricing page.